You wonder if Tim Tebow ever wishes he could go back in time. Not to Florida, where getting around the Gainesville campus became a hassle by the time he graduated to the NFL.

No, we’re talking about high school. Tebow was home-schooled, but played ball—football, baseball and basketball—at Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla., just 15 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean and a half hour southwest of Jacksonville.

Of course he was a star there, too. Autograph-seekers found him. So did college coaches and pro scouts. Some even drove by just to see where he played.

“I remember one Sunday afternoon when Tim was at Florida,” says Nease athletic director Ted Barbato. “I was coming back to do some work and I see a couple trying to take pictures through the fence. I go to the gate, open it up, introduce myself and they’re just in awe, ‘This is where Tim played. We’d just like to take some pictures of the field.’ I said, ‘You want to go on the field? I’ll open the gate, go.’ And these are people from the Midwest.”

Tebow’s legacy lives on there and not just as a football player. He also was a Major League prospect and played a little basketball, too.

Sporting News caught up with a few coaches from Tebow’s past to not talk about Tebow’s future, but to explore his past. Here’s what they had to say.

‘A SIX-TOOL PLAYER’

(Courtesy of The St. Augustine Record)

For Tebow, basketball bridged the gap between football and his other true love, baseball.

“He more or less did for me on the baseball field what he did for Coach (Craig) Howard on the football field,” says Greg “Boo” Mullins, who spent two seasons coaching Nease, including Tebow’s junior season in 2005. “He was a power-hitting left-hander who had a plus arm and plus speed. He was the leader of the team with his passion, his fire and his energy. He loved to play baseball, too. He just had a bigger fire for football.”

The Panthers lost in the Final Four of the state playoffs that season—they were blanked by Winter Haven pitcher and current Braves outfielder Jordan Schafer. Tebow hit cleanup, batted .494 with four home runs, 30 RBIs and 10 doubles. He made The St. Augustine Record’s All-County team, the Times-Union’s All-First Coast team and was a first-team All-State selection.

“Everybody should know this: He wasn’t just a great football player, he was a great baseball player, too,” Mullins says. “I believe he could have played in the big leagues.”

A left-handed pitcher, Mullins spent four seasons in the minors. He struck out 261 batters in 221 innings and saved 55 games. He pitched in two games for the Brewers in 1998 and didn’t allow a run.

“I had pro scouts calling, ‘Boo, is he going to play football or if we draft him do you think he’ll sign?’

“He was a six-tool player. He had arm strength, he could run, he could hit, he could hit for power, he could field, but his character made him that six-tool guy.”

Mulllins thinks Tebow would have been a round 7-12 draft pick and if he doubled as a baseball player at Florida, he could have emerged as a second-round talent.

That talent was on display often at Nease, especially at batting practice.

Mullins recalled an early season home game—before everyone knew just how good of a baseball player Tebow was—against his alma mater, Palatka.

He always put his big hitters in his final BP group at home games and that included Tebow. Mullins says it was a way to intimidate the visiting team as it arrived to the field.

Tebow insisted on being the last hitter in BP at practice and before games. He wouldn’t let Mullins stop throwing BP until he hit one out of the park. “Most of the time, it didn’t take but one or two pitches for him to hit it over the lights.”

As the Palatka players spilled onto the field, Tebow crushed a pitch over the 365-foot sign in right-center. It then cleared the outfield fence on the softball field some 50, 60 feet away and landed about 10 feet from the scoreboard, nearly another 100 feet away.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘OK, this kid is past being special. He just has something that’s God given.’ The bat speed to be 18 years old, to hit a ball 500 feet during BP when you’re throwing the ball 70 miles per hour was pretty remarkable. It was like when I got to the big leagues and saw (Mark) McGwire hit BP.”

They later “officially” measured the home run at 489 feet.

As much as Tebow did for Mullins’ team on the field, there was one thing he couldn’t do: sing. “The kid wrote a song when we were traveling to the Final Four—he can’t sing a lick now. He made up a song and sang it on the bus and it really got our guys jacked up for the game,” Mullin recalls. “He had every player and coach in the song. I remember that song. That’s probably what I remember most about him—all the funny things he had to say and that he was actually singing it. I wanted to close my ears, but it was so funny that I had to hear it.”

NOT MUCH OF A SHOOTER

(Courtesy of The St. Augustine Record)

Bud Beech coached Nease basketball for 24 seasons. He’s coached better players than Tebow—lots of them. But that didn’t keep Tebow, who played parts of his sophomore season and a full junior year for Beech, from leaving an impression.

“What stood out was his aggressiveness,” says Beech, now coach at nearby Ponte Vedra High School. “He could defend and he developed a little move underneath the basket—a little hook thing. He could get the shot off by using his body so well. I can’t remember if he ever made a 10-foot shot. I can’t remember him stepping out and doing much as far as shooting the ball. He had a flat shot. It was OK, but it wasn’t one where you’d say ‘just step out anytime.’ ”

Then-Florida coach Urban Meyer would show up for home games, along with other Division I football coaches. When the Panthers received plenty of attention on the road, too. Kids packed gyms just “to get a look at Tim Tebow and see him play basketball,” says Beech. He says opposing fans were disappointed early in the 2005-06 season to arrive at games only to find out Tebow was not on the team because he was enrolling early at Florida.

As a sophomore, playing a reduced schedule because he spent the first part of the season recovering from a broken leg, Tebow scored a total of 31 points with a high game of seven. The following season, his stats are a bit of a mystery. He scored 21 points in a 56-53 loss to rival St. Augustine on Jan. 14, 2005, but that’s all current Nease coach Scott Cooper can find. He has scorebooks from every season of Nease basketball—1982 through 2013—except the 04-05 season. “Very strange,” Cooper says. “I am thinking someone grabbed it after Tebow became a bit famous. Everything is in these boxes except that (season).”

That wasn’t the only strange thing during Tebow’s hoops-playing days.

Tebow was originally given jersey No. 52. He didn’t think that was becoming of his size and skill set. That number is better suited for the big guys like his Nease teammate and future Gator offensive lineman James Wilson, who checked in at 6-4 and about 300 pounds.

“He says, ‘Coach, you know, usually a big 6-5, 6-6 slow inside guy wears that jersey,’ ” Beech remembers. “That’s true. James Wilson also played basketball for us. I don’t know how I found a jersey that fit James Wilson.

“Nonetheless, Tim ended up being 21 because it’s a little bit more of a number that he associated with himself as being more of an athletic-type player versus a big thug—a big, slow center—in the middle.”

‘BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER’

(Courtesy of The St. Augustine Record)

As the story goes, Tebow played linebacker and tight end as a freshman at Trinity Christian. His brother, Peter, was a senior linebacker on that state championship-winning team. Tebow wanted to play quarterback the next season; the Trinity Christian coaching staff had other plans for its run-dominated offense.

“At that point, Tebow started looking for a school,” then-Nease offensive coordinator Ken Fasnacht tells Sporting News. “The timing—it was the collision of perfect worlds. Nobody in the Jacksonville area really threw the ball. Everybody was a Wing-T team or power running team.”

But not at Nease, where head coach Craig Howard and Fasnacht were installing a wide-open, throw-it-down-the-field attack.

“It wasn’t like Timmy was an unknown,” says Fasnacht, now Howard’s offensive coordinator at Southern Oregon University. “He was considered the most dominant youth football player at quarterback in the area. He’d been playing quarterback all his life until he went to Trinity Christian. … To Trinity’s defense, they were a Wing-T, run-the-football team and had a bunch of athletes who could run the ball. We had no problem putting him at quarterback.”

And, for the record, Trinity went on to win the 1A state championship again that year without Tebow (but didn’t reach the title game the following two seasons).

“The very first day he showed up on campus, you know as soon as he threw the first ball that we had a quarterback that was going to be special,” says Fasnacht, who knows a thing or two about offense. Southern Oregon led NAIA last season in scoring (52.8 points) and total offense (642.0 yards). “He wanted to be a quarterback since he was a little kid. Football was not his sport—playing quarterback was his sport. He was a very focused individual.”

The numbers prove it. He threw for 9,810 yards and 95 touchdowns in three seasons and ran for 3,186 yards and another 62 scores. Nease, not even a blip on the football map in the state of Florida prior to his arrival, lost in the 3A region finals Tebow’s junior season and won the 4A state title—the school’s first—a year later.

Plenty of moments stand out for Fasnacht from the time he coached Tebow. One of the first was opening day of spring practice in 2003—Tebow’s first appearance as a Nease football player.

“He’s out throwing balls, having fun and we have nine kids that think they can play receiver at that point and none of them are very good at the time,” he laughs. “He’s throwing balls and I remember that I don’t think I saw a kid catch one because they were coming in so hard, zipping in like a real quarterback, bouncing off kids’ chests. I told coach that we needed to find some receivers because this guy can throw it.”

Tebow took the program from a less-than-.500 team to state champions in three seasons. Fasnacht says his contributions were much greater than wins and losses.

“The Timmy legacy began the day he arrived on campus as a sophomore. Nobody in our football program looked like him. He was bigger, stronger, faster, the day he got here,” Fasnacht says. “He was power-cleaning 260 and benching 350. A lot of those little scrawny sophomores that ended up playing Division I football, by the time they graduated had either passed Timmy or were as strong as Timmy. He showed them what a Division I football player actually looked like.”

During the four-year period that overlapped Tebow’s tenure at Nease, Fasnacht says 32 players signed to play Division I football—an amazing total for a program that had precious few in its first 20 years of existence.

“Our kids got a walking example every day of what he can physically lift, how he can run, how he works and our whole program came to that level. Instead of having one Timmy Tebow and 10 dwarves, we had 11 guys, 22 guys who were working every bit as hard as Timmy Tebow,” Fasnacht says. “His legacy was that he taught those guys how to do that. He built a lot of other great football players, not just because he was good—he made them good because they learned to work as hard as him.”